Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Jeffrey Wilson - The Donors

In Jeffrey Wilson’s The
Donors, we come to the hospital along with its abused main character. We
soon grow to know not only the hospital’s staff but also the demonic Lizard Men
that torture humanity’s villains. Wilson’s premise works, but his plot and
structure are soon peppered with flaws. Still, his characters and writing had
enough kinetic spark to keep me going.

Wilson's biggest hook is his skill with character. After being
horribly burned by his mother’s abusive boyfriend, Nathan is admitted to the
hospital by Dr. Jason Gelman and tended to by Nurse Jenny. Each, the reader
soon learns, was abused as a child, and the two adults are drawn to Nathan and
to each other by the memories of their own experience and their desire to help
him through his. As the bonds between them deepen, they create for and among
themselves the connections and loves that they failed to find in their
families.

All of this is a bit oversimplified. In the first place,
their utter lack of connections outside of the three of them is hard to
swallow. For Jason, whose family is long gone and whose job kept him from close
connections, it works to some extent. But, while convincing reasons are given
for Jenny’s lack of familial closeness, statements like “Jason seemed the only
reality she could be sure of right now” (p. 137) did less to make me feel her
isolation than to wonder why she doesn’t have a single friend outside of her
love interest. Things are even stranger for Nathan, because, while his mom’s
boyfriend was a pile of shit in human form, his mother seems quite nice. The
text often addresses this, with Jason repeatedly telling himself that the abuse
wasn’t her fault. But she is nonetheless sidelined, present but emotionally
ignored while the main characters grow closer.

As for that growing closer, it moves at a sprint, with
characters who have kept others away for their whole lifetimes not only letting
someone in within a hundred page’s time but also saying things like “I just
have some stuff from my past” (p. 53) five minutes into the relationship, which
is also known as precisely how people desperate to hide their pasts don’t
behave. As for why they are together, we frequently get sentences about Jenny
and Jason’s love like “She had no idea why on earth she felt that way” (p. 56),
which any experienced fiction reader can tell you is the code for love by
authorial fiat.

And yet none of that really matters, because the characters
feel like real people, and they feel like they truly have been hurt, and they
act like they truly are in love. Yeah, the pacing of it all is compressed into
the timeframe of a fast paced novel. But that doesn't kill it. Though baldly expressed, Jason’s admission
that “the more someone tried to get to know him, the more he tried to turn a
conversation superficial” (p. 36) is only one of the ways in which Wilson captures
the twin paradoxical and irresistible urges to pull someone closer and push
them away. Moreover, the budding love between the three is genuinely touching
and manages to feel like a less raw but still powerful version of Poppy Z.
Brite’s frequent theme of misfits forming together to form their own family in
opposition to the world that’s cast them out.

In terms of prose, both Wilson’s biggest strengths and
biggest failings come from the childlike tone he uses for Nathan. Jason and
Jenny speak in workable but not remarkable voices, but Nathan’s dialogue feels
like an authentic blend of determined and immature. The kid’s frequent thoughts
about the Power Ranges keep him feeling young, and a good number of his lines
are full-on charming, my favorite of which comes as he ventures into the
metaphysical and hellish lair of his foes: “This sucks,” he said loudly as he continued
on into the slowly brightening passage. He felt he had earned the right to use
big kid words today (p. 224). Unfortunately, Nathan’s voice has a tendency
to bleed into the rest of the narration, and, coming from an adult’s mouth, his
lines are less cute than cringe worthy, the worst of which comes when one of
the so-called Lizard Men distinguishes between two types of horrific torture by
saying that It was the difference between
eating a milkshake through a straw or with a spoon (p. 201). Some phrases
also have a tendency to leap between perspectives, like how everyone starts
saying that dreams were just like that (p.
37), a phrase that not only makes no sense to me (dreams are just like what?) but that is inexplicably thought
by everyone in the hospital without any of them ever actually saying it out
loud.

By this point, though, you probably have more pressing
questions than what dreams are like. Where, you are no doubt thinking to
yourselves, is the horror in this horror novel? Why haven’t you discussed that
yet? In answer to your question, hypothetical reader, I delayed discussing the
Lizard Men till after I finished talking about the characters because, when the
Lizard Men work, it’s entirely because the characters’ strength makes us accept
their promise, and, when the focus shifts entirely onto them at the book’s
close, it becomes disappointingly clear that our demonic foe of the hour could
have been better thought out.

The Lizard Men get humans to go along with them by promising
retribution to the scum of the world, and then, with the aid of medical
personnel, they surgically torture the intestines out of their victims. But
it’s all a fuzzy mess. The Lizard Men have their own cave dimension, where they
go to torture their victims, where they bring Jenny, and it can only be reached
when sleeping. But then it turns out that all the torturing was actually
(maybe?) in an operating room in the hospital that, somehow, just went
unnoticed by the whole staff. Only, Jenny never went to the operating room, and
the doctors that helped out never went to the cave. And do the demons
supernaturally abduct their victims, or do they fake their victims’ death using
anesthetics? If the latter, how are they really supernatural? Why do the cops
listen to them? Instead of answer any of these (or a dozen other) questions,
the finale just shows them being inexplicably destroyed by Nathan’s utterly
unexplained Chosen Oneness.

It’s also disturbing in all the wrong ways that the male
doctors that are brought into this help the demons by being doctors, while
Jenny, though theoretically brought along for her nursing abilities, just
spends her time “writhing” (p. 120) and “naked” (p. 81), while we hear about
how “her creamy skin glistened with a film of sweat that made her young and
athletic build more erotic” (pp. 81-82). It’s ever so nice to see a female
character amounting to nothing more than an unconscious but sexy body for the
male heroes to save! While we are on the same subject, I can’t say that I was a
fan of how our one and only black character is a dumbass thug that can’t
understand the big words the doctors’ use, gets called the n-word (p. 152), and
refers to other black people as “brothers” (p. 157).

The Lizard Man plot does bring up some interesting thematic
questions, but Wilson evolves them just far enough that they are dangling and
questionable but utterly unresolved. Jason knows that Nathan’s abuser will
never get what he deserves and wonders how to tell a kid that the world sucked, that people like Steve felt nothing
but anger and hate? How did you tell him that the man wouldn’t pay at all for
the pain he had brought this brave boy? (p. 26) Into that picture come the
Lizard Men, and, despite the horror of the wide-awake, pain-focused surgeries
they perform, it’s hard not to see their torture of bastards like Steve as
their just deserts. Before long, Wilson complicates this. The Lizard Men don’t
care about the suffering that people like Steve cause, they just take advantage
of the excuse it gives them to cause pain. Then we find out that they will
manufacture pain to give themselves an excuse to take advantage of it. If
you’ll forgive my venturing into spoilers for a moment (and feel free to skip
to the next paragraph if you are), we need to talk about how Jenny never
actually was abused. It was a lie told by the Lizard Men, one planted in her
head to get her to help them out.

There, Wilson ventures deep into dangerous but interesting
territory. He seems poised to explore our need for revenge and how just it
really is, but he also seems perilously close to calling all victimization a
fabricated excuse for lashing out. In the end, Wilson goes to neither extreme.
In fact, he doesn’t really go anywhere. From the revelation about Jenny to the
end, the book’s morality is put on hold for our (extremely disappointing)
showdown with the lizard folk, and not another word is heard about the
justifications our ramifications of our actions until, with their adventure
concluded, Jason congratulates himself on learning a lot about good and evil (p. 245). But that feels less like what
happened than what should have happened, with the book’s actual thematic conclusions
really seeming to be more along the lines of “Lizard Men are bad,” without it
ever quite bringing itself to tread near the question of where specifically the
dividing lines are that make them so and how those apply to those of us without
access to strange cave dimensions.

My reading of it finished and my reviewing of it nearly
done, I still don’t feel a hundred percent sure of how to characterize The Donors. It’s a problematic novel
that doesn’t go much of anywhere thematically and bungles the plot. Still, the
characters are filled with spark, and it’s an enjoyable read for most of its
length for exactly that reason. One hopes that, in his other works, Wilson is
able to better marry his skills with character to the rest of the writing craft.

...Who?

I spend my free time reading and writing. In addition to assorted other content, I'll be posting a book review every Tuesday. I have also published a fair few stories, a complete list of which can be found here. If you want to get in contact with me for any reason, feel free to email me at nskteh[at]gmail[dot]com.